[In The Loop] Episode 1 – From First Touch to Full Scale - The Power of "Journey Builder"

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:07][music] >> Telcos are actually very good at strategy.

[00:00:11]The operators know what they want to launch and they know when they want to launch it.

[00:00:16]The frustration we hear from operators is actually about [music] the timing.

[00:00:20]By the time the Telco operator ships uh the opportunity has potentially passed.

[00:00:24][music] Uh think about a seasonal offer, uh regulatory change, a reaction to a competitor's move.

[00:00:30]>> [music] >> It's always too much effort. Push it through the engineering cycle and operators are waiting weeks for a release window.

[00:00:38]Journey Builder gives operators back their timing.

[00:00:41]Every journey change, however small, is now a matter of configuration, not engineering effort.

[00:00:47]Journey Builder, we believe, reduces the gap between "Here's an amazing idea we want to take to market" >> [music] >> and actually getting that idea live from weeks to days.

[00:00:57]The bigger picture though, and that's what really [music] excites me, is that separating the journey logic from your core systems, [music] understanding how they work, controlling the behavior, and optimizing them as you launch into multiple new markets is exactly the prerequisite [music] for our platform to train the AI to start doing this autonomously [music] sometime in the future. And that shift from we need to wait weeks to we can [music] do it just in a matter of days or hours is actually what will set us up for the next big wave of agentic AI.

[00:01:30]Because once your journeys are in the orchestration layer, >> [music] >> AI can start operating on them autonomously. Not just helping you configure faster, but actually sensing what's not working and adapting the journey in real time.

[00:01:43]We believe that is a foundation for agentic BSS. [music] We envision in the not-too-distant future a system detects a drop-off, proposes a fix, and you [music] approve it in just one click.

[00:01:55]The trajectory starts there and these are really, really exciting times.

[00:02:06]Honestly, [music] it's fragmented by design, but not by intent.

[00:02:10]Most operators are running journeys >> [music] >> stitched together across four or five systems, a CRM, a BSS stack, maybe a campaign tool, and some custom middleware holding it all together.

[00:02:22]Each of these systems [music] was built for a different era.

[00:02:26]Uh some for voice, some for postpaid, mass market offers.

[00:02:30]What you end up with really is a patchwork. And the problem isn't that operators haven't invested. [music] Many have spent significantly. The problem is the architecture was never built for the speed that digital and [music] the segments in consumers of this day and age of AI require.

[00:02:47]On the other hand, a journey isn't a campaign.

[00:02:49]>> [music] >> Right? It's a continuous dynamic interaction, and most Telco stacks treat it like a batch [music] process.

[00:02:56]So, operators are trying to run a real-time business on infrastructure that was designed for quarterly planning cycles.

[00:03:03]That is the fundamental tension that we see across every market that we operate in.

[00:03:13]Three things consistently.

[00:03:15]First, dependency [music] chains.

[00:03:18]Changing one step in a journey requires sign-offs and code changes [music] across multiple systems.

[00:03:24]There is no single owner, so every change becomes a huge engineering project.

[00:03:30]Second, testing environments, or rather the lack of them.

[00:03:35]Operators can't safely test the journey modification without touching production, which means changes get batched, delayed, or worse, avoided altogether.

[00:03:47]Third, and this one doesn't get talked about enough, organizational misalignment.

[00:03:54]The business team decides the journey or the product team decides the journey.

[00:03:58][music] The engineering team builds it and by the time it's live, the market context is already shifted.

[00:04:06]You end up launching something that was relevant 6 months [music] ago.

[00:04:10]This bottleneck isn't just technical, it's the gap between the people who understand the consumer and the market and the people who control the systems. [music] Johnny Builder was specifically designed to close that gap.

[00:04:26]>> [music] >> In most operator environments we've seen, >> [music] >> a small change, reordering KYC steps, adjusting a payment flow, or adding a new onboarding screen takes anywhere from 4 to 12 [music] weeks.

[00:04:43]That's not an exaggeration. That is the reality of change request [music] processes, development queues, regression testing, and release cycles.

[00:04:52]And this isn't unique to legacy operators. Even digitally ambitious telcos [music] hit this wall because the underlying BSS architecture wasn't built for iteration.

[00:05:02]What that means commercially is brutal.

[00:05:05]You design an offer for specific acquisition window and by the time the journey is live, that window has passed.

[00:05:11]>> [music] >> You are launching into yesterday's market.

[00:05:20]>> [music] >> The disconnect is translation loss.

[00:05:24]A commercial team has a very clear intent.

[00:05:27]Acquire this segment during this window with this offer through this channel.

[00:05:30][music] Simple enough, right? But by the time that intent travels through product [music] specification, engineering tickets, BSS configuration, and multiple testing [music] cycles, it's been interpreted, approximated, and compromised at every single handoff.

[00:05:47]What launches is only a version of the original idea and not the idea itself.

[00:05:52]And operators have normalized this.

[00:05:54]They've built entire planning processes around the assumption that there will be a gap between what the business wants and what the system delivers.

[00:06:02]>> [music] >> That normalization is the real problem.

[00:06:05]Because it caps ambition.

[00:06:06]Right? Teams stop asking for what they actually need because they know that the system can't keep [music] up.

[00:06:18]When one thinks of telecom, one thinks of network and router and switches, essentially hardware.

[00:06:24]Doing experimentation at hardware level is much more difficult than doing experimentation at the software stack.

[00:06:30][music] Unfortunately, this thinking still prevails in our telecom industry.

[00:06:36]It's only in the late '90s and early 2000s with [music] the advent of large internet giants such as Google and Amazon was the concept of quick AB experimentation become really center stage.

[00:06:49]Most famously, Google did an experiment to test which of 40 [music] shades of blue gets most clicks on an hyperlink.

[00:06:57]Telecom should not be left behind when it comes to experimentation. [music] We at Circles are committed to make sure we change this narrative.

[00:07:05]We want to make experimentation [music] a core to everything that we do or that we offer to our customers.

[00:07:20]Traditionally, [music] making even a small change in a customer journey used to require weeks of design, coding, testing, [music] launch, monitoring.

[00:07:30]Now, imagine you want to do five experiments parallelly.

[00:07:33]>> [music] >> It's just a logistical nightmare.

[00:07:37]One of our growth [music] product managers observed that many subscribers are not completing their KYC and were just dropping off the funnel.

[00:07:45]She wanted to do experiments [music] with sending reminders to the subscribers and see its effect on the conversion rate, what we call CR. [music] She wanted to conduct variety of tests such as whether to send reminders within 24 [music] hours or 48 hours or 72 hours.

[00:08:02]With Journey Journey Builder, she was able to set up and test her experiment [music] within hours.

[00:08:08]What we're trying to do with Journey Builder is eliminate that translation layer entirely. [music] So, business intent becomes system behavior directly.

[00:08:20]When I look at what this team has built over the last 2 years, two bits [music] stand out. First, we standardized our domains. Second, we figured out how to make those domains work together intelligently.

[00:08:31]And by solving these problems, what this [music] team has created is now changing the way we build for our mobile network operators.

[00:08:40]Telco journeys do not break at the surface, [music] they break underneath.

[00:08:44]Any journey, be it onboarding, SIM replacement, plan change, >> [music] >> span across layers like OSS, BSS, network systems, which [music] were not actually designed to work together.

[00:08:54]Different vendors, different data models, different assumptions.

[00:08:58]The real risk is at the system boundaries. That is where data misaligns [music] and journeys break. And when they do, it just doesn't cause bad customer experience, it also results in double [music] charges, failed activations, or even revenue leakage. The pattern was very clear.

[00:09:15]Weak domain boundaries meant fragile orchestration.

[00:09:19]And this can't be fixed only at the orchestration layer.

[00:09:21]>> [music] >> The foundation had to be fixed first.

[00:09:28]The brief was precise. [music] Not clean up the APIs, but the shared language doesn't [music] exist, and that's why everything at the boundaries.

[00:09:38]We went domain by domain, identity, billing, [music] provisioning, fulfillment, product catalog, and drew clean boundaries.

[00:09:47]>> [music] >> Each domain owns its data, its logic, its APIs. No shared databases, >> [music] >> no shortcuts. Once that was done, we had something powerful and a new problem.

[00:10:00]Clean domains that still need to talk to each other for any real customer journey to work.

[00:10:12]While the domain work was underway, we focused [music] on the orchestration problem. The requirement was very clear.

[00:10:18]State management, intelligent retries, branching, real-time visibility into every journey.

[00:10:24]That combination made one thing very clear that this is not a integration or a middleware problem. Instead, this is an orchestration problem.

[00:10:32]Once we all aligned on that, the path forward became very clear.

[00:10:41]This is an inflection point. The team [music] had defined what the solution needed to look like and build the foundation for that. But the customer doesn't experience domains, [music] they experience journeys.

[00:10:51]Those journeys cut across every single domain that had [music] just been cleaned up.

[00:10:56]So, how do you compose journeys without undoing the standardization that the team has already done?

[00:11:01]That's the question that this team answered by building the journey builder.

[00:11:12]Now that the domains were clean, the problem shape [music] was very well understood, and the requirements were precise. The answer to all of them was the conductor.

[00:11:21]We followed the mantra, don't stitch inside the domains, instead orchestrate above them.

[00:11:26]>> [music] >> What that essentially means is that each domain exposes its capabilities as discrete tasks [music] and conductor owns up the responsibility of stitching them into the journeys.

[00:11:36][music] No domain knows what journey it is participating into. No domain is coupled to one another.

[00:11:43]And when [music] we mapped conductor's capabilities against the requirements such as state, branching, intelligent retry, and visibility, conductor delivered all of them. [music] And we were very much impressed with what conductor had to offer to us.

[00:12:03]Modifying a journey before conductor.

[00:12:05][music] Let's make it very concrete by taking a real-world example.

[00:12:09]Let's say I want to add an identity check [music] of a customer before initiating a payment.

[00:12:14]What this earlier meant was that the orchestration logic itself had [music] to change within a service.

[00:12:20]You had to get an integration testing done across services and get sign-off from all the teams that were involved. [music] At best, a sprint's effort or even more.

[00:12:29]And the overhead still existed for a solution alignment, back-and-forth [music] decision-making among competing priorities.

[00:12:40]How conductor helps in modifying a journey.

[00:12:43]With conductor, [music] that same change is a new workflow version.

[00:12:47]Just define it, test it in isolation, and promote it.

[00:12:51]No redeployment, no cross-team release coordination, [music] no change freeze.

[00:12:56]This is what low-code actually means from the engineering standpoint. [music] And conductor helps us achieve exactly that.

[00:13:03]What we mean is journey logic lives in the workflow definition, not in a deployed code.

[00:13:09]>> [music] >> Engineers still build the task and own the domain services, but the composition of those tasks into journeys is now a configuration concern.

[00:13:19]>> [music] >> That changes your deployment frequency, risk profile, and operational overhead simultaneously. So, we attacked all the problems with Conductor.

[00:13:33]Now, how Conductor helps us win and where the AI enters.

[00:13:38]Because Conductor is version controlled, you can run multiple journey versions simultaneously. [music] For example, in an MVNO context, you can have one journey with multiple versions, each catering to different customer needs.

[00:13:52]>> [music] >> These are the workflow definitions that coexist, independently testable and promotable as well. Point to notice, these are not the code branches, [music] not even deployment variants, and all these things are achieved using one-stop solution that is Conductor. Now, that brings me to the point of how AI fits into the Conductor.

[00:14:12]Treat [music] an AI agent as just another task into the orchestrated journey, where it has its [music] own defined input and defined output. So, what that means is, we are not rebuilding the journey around the AI, the AI already fits into it.

[00:14:32]The risk with AI in a customer [music] journey is downstream consequence.

[00:14:36]A wrong call at a step three, and steps four and five are already in motion.

[00:14:40]>> [music] >> Payment is triggered, SIM is provisioned, or a contract is activated.

[00:14:44]You can't easily unwind that.

[00:14:46]What Conductor gives us is human review gates. The journey pauses at a designated [music] step, the human reviews the AI's recommendation, the journey proceeds only on [music] explicit approval.

[00:14:57]That oversight is the first step in workflow definition.

[00:15:00]Not bolted on, but designed in.

[00:15:02]>> [music] >> You get AI-assisted decisions where they add value without >> [music] >> removing any human accountability where it matters.

[00:15:15]Now, how Conductor helps with observability and reliability. [music] We know that every journey runs through the conductor. Therefore, [music] we have full visibility. For example, which step a customer dropped off or which step had to be replayed. [music] All these things are available at the conductor dashboard. And how this helps developers is that they needn't have to go through n number of services by correlating the logs.

[00:15:46]System integrators were always required because every integration [music] was bespoke. A new MVNO always meant one-to-point integrations, [music] new testing cycles, new data mappings.

[00:15:56]With standardized domains and conductor [music] in place, we have a pre-built, pre-tested task in stack, which can be used to compose your journey.

[00:16:05]>> [music] >> The integrations are already taken care, and what remains is just the configuration.

[00:16:14]Process UAE is the proof point. [music] In the previous model, months.

[00:16:19]Mapping the KYC requirements, >> [music] >> coordinating the activation sequence across provisioning and billing.

[00:16:26]Building custom branching logic, [music] testing, deploying, and stabilizing.

[00:16:30]What actually happened? We composed their journey from existing tasks.

[00:16:35]UAE [music] specific KYC was a configuration of identity task. Payment sequencing used existing [music] billing capabilities. SIM delivery reused proven provisioning tasks. Months [music] became weeks, and most of that was UAT, not building.

[00:16:52]That is the multiplier effect of a [music] task library and the proven orchestration layer.

[00:16:59]We diagnosed the problem with enough precision that we knew what we are solving for.

[00:17:03]We built the foundation [music] that made everything above it trustworthy.

[00:17:07]We eventually built the orchestration layer that lets business move fast on top of it. All these decisions compound, [music] and that's how you build a Telco platform that scales.

[00:17:23]A shift that's already underway and will accelerate is from journey execution to journey [music] intelligence.

[00:17:31]Today, operators design a journey, deploy and measure it after the fact.

[00:17:35]Three to five years from now, >> [music] >> the journey will design itself in real time based on who the customer is, what they're doing and what outcome you're optimizing for. [music] We're moving from static flows to dynamic adaptive experiences.

[00:17:49]The other big shift is [music] channel collapse.

[00:17:52]Customer support bots are the most celebrated use case of [music] agentic AI around, especially in the telecom.

[00:18:00]But let me provide an example from >> [music] >> a customer onboarding journey.

[00:18:05]Many telecom operators require their subscribers to upload KYC documents such [music] as driving license for verification.

[00:18:14]Only once [music] the verification is completed is the SIM card activated.

[00:18:19]With Journey Builder's agentic AI support, >> [music] >> an operator can easy easily plug in an agent to do this verification instead of doing manual verifications. [music] One can even have a human in the loop.

[00:18:33]By that I mean if the confidence level of the verification is below a [music] certain threshold, a human can step in.

[00:18:41]Journey Builder has been designed to support such and many more agents.

[00:18:46]That's what I meant by Journey Builder [music] is truly agentic ready.

[00:18:50]Consumers will expect continuity across every touch point and operators that can't deliver [music] that will feel it in Sean.

[00:18:58]The underlying requirement if you see for all of this is the same, a configurable headless orchestration layer that can respond to signals in real time.

[00:19:07]>> [music] >> That is not a future investment, that's a now investment.

[00:19:16]AI agents will do to Telco operations [music] what automation did to manufacturing, but faster and further.

[00:19:24]In the near term, we are already seeing agents [music] take over high-volume, rule-based interaction.

[00:19:30]Plan recommendations, usage alerts, payment handling, and basic troubleshooting.

[00:19:35]That's the [music] surface layer.

[00:19:38]The more significant shift is in the back office. AI agents coordinating across [music] systems, managing exceptions, flagging journey drop-offs before they become churn events.

[00:19:50]At Circles, we are building toward a model we call Nova.

[00:19:53]An operator co-pilot that gives commercial teams real-time visibility and control over journey performance without needing to raise an IT ticket >> [music] >> every time something needs to change.

[00:20:07]The operators who will win aren't the ones who deploy the most AI.

[00:20:11]It's the ones [music] who integrate AI into the decision layer of their journey orchestration. [music] That's where the real leverage is.

[00:20:26]They become infrastructure providers, and infrastructure is a margin compression game.

[00:20:31]If you can't move at market speed, you feed the customer relationship to whoever can.

[00:20:38]That might be an OTT player, a fintech, a digital native MVNO launching on your own network.

[00:20:44]We've already seen this playbook in markets where operators were slow. They end up with the pipes, but not the relationship.

[00:20:51]>> [music] >> And the compounding effect is brutal.

[00:20:54]Slow systems attract slow talent. Slow talent builds slow road maps, and eventually you're three cycles behind with no clear path back.

[00:21:03]The operators we are most worried about aren't the ones with legacy stacks.

[00:21:06][music] Legacy can be worked around.

[00:21:09]The ones at real risk are the operators who know they need to change but are waiting for a perfect migration moment that never arrives. In this environment, the cost of waiting is higher than the cost of moving imperfectly.

[00:21:28]Journey Builder gives operators something most platforms don't. The ability to separate the business logic of a journey from the underlying systems that execute it.

[00:21:37]That sounds architectural, but the commercial implication is very significant. [music] It means an operator can launch a new brand, enter a new segment, or respond to a competitive move without [music] engineering their core stack every time.

[00:21:52]The reusability is real. We are targeting 70% reusable components across new market launches.

[00:21:58]That's not just faster GTM, that's a structural cost advantage that compounds over time.

[00:22:04]And as they layer in AI, experimentation, personalization, performance intelligence, and [music] operator-authored journeys, the platform gets smarter with every deployment.

[00:22:16]So, the competitive position isn't just be more faster today.

[00:22:20]>> [music] >> It's be learn faster, and that gap widens. For operators thinking about the next decade, Journey Builder is the foundation that makes everything else possible.

[00:22:32]>> [music] >> Standardize the domains, then orchestrate them intelligently.

[00:22:39]>> [music] >> Both these bets have paid off, and the platform architecture is now ready for AI.

[00:22:44]Clean domain [music] are the foundation.

[00:22:47]We made sure nothing built on top >> [music] >> could dirty them. You cannot orchestrate a journey in a Telco platform with foundational problems. Identifying that problem and finding the right solution is what made everything [music] else possible. So, all in all, Conductor sits above the domains and composes [music] them.

[00:23:04]Journeys evolve without services getting changed. MVNOs get onboarded without rebuilding and [music] AI plugs in without redesigning.